SharePoint serendipity is the effect by which one accidentally discovers something fortunate, especially while looking for something else entirely. In this case, it is the occassional musings, observations, and Ouija board readings about the phabulously

One of the original goals I always had for Office365Mon was the hope that at some point it should be able to monitor enough outages to qualify me for a refund on my Office 365 monthly charges. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Office 365 has a guaranteed uptime service level agreement (SLA) of 99.9%. When the availability is less than that you are entitled to a refund. The exact amount of the refund varies based on how long your service was unavailable, among other things. For complete details on Microsoft’s SLA you should visit this link: http://microsoftvolumelicensing.com/DocumentSearch.aspx?Mode=3&DocumentTypeId=37 and download the document for your language.

In my case, the dream became reality last weekend when I got both email and text notifications from Office365Mon that my SharePoint Online site was down. It’s not uncommon to get these notifications but they’re generally fairly short lived and since I’ve started Office365Mon Microsoft has done a good job with its availability. This time though I got the initial notice that an outage had started…but I wasn’t getting a subsequent notice that it had ended. Finally, about two hours later (126 minutes to be exact) I got the notification that the outage had ended. A quick check on the number of minutes in the month of April left me realizing that my up time for April had dropped below 99.9%; I was at 99.7%, which meant that I should be entitled to a 25% refund of my monthly charges.